Lip coloring has had a long and interesting history. Women started coloring their lips at least about 5000 years ago when Mesopotamian women decorated their lips with crushed jewels. About 1500 BC to 3000 BC, women in the Indus Valley colored their lips with a red dye. According to Meg Cohen Ragas and Karen Kozlowski in their book, “Read My Lips: A Cultural History of Lipstick,” Egyptian women colored their lips with henna and with a preparation that included a purplish-red dye obtained from seaweed, iodine, and bromine marmite. It is believed that Cleopatra colored her lips with a formulation that included a dye extracted from crushed carmine beetles and ants.
During the period of Queen Elizabeth I, women colored their lips with a formulation that included beeswax and red dye. Queen Elizabeth herself, colored her lips black according to some sources and red, according to others. According to Ragas and Kozlowski, Thomas Hall, an English pastor and author of the “Loathsomeness of Long Haire” (1653), led a movement declaring that face painting was “the devil's work” and that women who put brush to mouth were trying to “ensnare others and to kindle a fire and flame of lust in the hearts of those who cast their eyes upon them.” In 1770, the British Parliament passed a law condemning lipstick, stating that “women found guilty of seducing men into matrimony by a cosmetic means could be tried for witchcraft.”
Modern lip coloring was formulated by perfumers in Paris in 1884. The lip coloring was wrapped in silk paper and made with deer tallow, castor oil and beeswax.